Kevin Kenney
Kevin Thomas Kenney was born December 29, 1959, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the fifth of eight children of William and Dorothy Kenney. He attended Annunciation Grade School and graduated from DeLaSalle High School in 1978, then earned degrees in business administration and Spanish from the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul. After college he moved to Chicago, where he was a Claretian lay volunteer, directed their lay volunteer program, and spent five years in Claretian formation before discerning a call to diocesan priesthood.
He entered The Saint Paul Seminary and was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis by Archbishop John Roach on May 28, 1994. His parish ministry took him to St. Olaf in Minneapolis, Our Lady of Peace in Minneapolis, Our Lady of Guadalupe in St. Paul, where he served a Latino community, and to Divine Mercy in Faribault and St. Michael in Kenyon. As vicar for Latino ministry from 2010 to 2018 he helped reopen the archdiocesan Office of Latino Ministry, and taught theology as an adjunct professor and was chaplain at his high school alma mater.
Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop on July 25, 2024, and he was consecrated at the Cathedral of Saint Paul on October 28, 2024, returning as pastor of St. Olaf in Minneapolis. In February 2025 he was appointed a vicar general and vicar for Latino ministry, continuing his work among the archdiocese's Latino Catholics and its downtown community. In July 2026 he shared publicly a lung cancer diagnosis, asking for prayers and speaking of the illness as a journey walked with hope, under the theme Project Hope.
Bishop Kenney is an auxiliary bishop, not the diocesan ordinary, so the power to authorize, restrict, or relocate celebration of the 1962 Missal in the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis belongs to Archbishop Bernard Hebda, not to him. No statement, decree, permission, or restriction by Kenney himself concerning the older liturgy was found in the sources searched for this dossier, and none is claimed for him.
The archdiocesan context is Hebda's, not Kenney's. In July 2021 Hebda directed that Mass in the extraordinary form continue where it was already offered, granting the necessary faculties to priests already celebrating it, while barring new public celebrations without his written permission. In July 2026 Hebda said the traditional liturgy continued to be celebrated in six locations throughout the archdiocese, naming St. Agnes in St. Paul as one of them. That count is the ordinary's, and it is carried here in prose only, not entered as Kenney's site count.
Kenney's own public record in the period searched is pastoral rather than liturgical-governing: Latino ministry, downtown parish life, and, from July 2026, a public cancer journey under the theme Project Hope. Until he issues a governing act of his own on the 1962 Missal, the honest posture for his auxiliary tenure is no_record, and any future act by him would need to be added as a new action rather than read back into this tenure.